`Bones' piles onto crowded world of TV detection

Dr. Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) is a forensic anthropologist at the Jeffersonian Institution in Washington, D.C. She can glean all sorts of information and crime clues from skeletal remains, even partial ones in pieces. A bag of bones retrieved from underwater in her first case, for instance, tells her the victim was female, multiracial, pregnant and an avid tennis player.

To give investigators (and the ordinary viewer) an idea of her penetrating vision, computer expert and colleague Angela (Michaela Conlin) translates her findings into a vividly detailed hologram. A victim first glimpsed only as a partial skeleton comes back to life in a three-dimensional projection.

Science makes her work easy; her fellow sleuths do not. Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz), the handsome ex-sniper and special FBI agent who works with her, rubs her the wrong way with his macho posturing. ("Don't call me 'Bones,' " she begs, every time he does so.) He distrusts her and all the other scholarly geeks in her scientific cadre, folks he dismisses as "squints," a reference to their penchant for spectacles.

Even Brennan worries that her 20-20 insight into skeletons takes a toll on her social life. "My most meaningful relationships," she laments, "are with dead people."

Inspired by the novels of real-life anthropologist Kathy Reichs, "Bones" does represent a new twist in the crowded world of fictional TV detection. Tuesday's opener, though, doesn't boast much originality in terms of human drama. The murder plot, about a missing woman thought to be a U.S. senator's mistress, turns out to be a fairly unimaginative riff on the case of Chandra Levy. The plotting is so thin we don't even care when the denouement is rattled off so quickly, it's barely decipherable or even audible.

The scientific setup may be intriguing, buoyed by awesome shots of the laboratory's spacious quarters. The atmospheric touches are nice: The camera slowly sweeps over bone fragments on a light table to the pleasant strains of an easy-listening rock score in one sequence.

But the dialogue, including the contrived sexual tension between Temperance and Seeley, is strictly canned and cutesy. The scientists are accused of not knowing anything about "the real world," a phrase you rarely hear anywhere but on television. "I hate psychology, it's a soft science," Temperance complains to her pal Angela. "Yeah," Angela retorts, "but people are mostly soft." And Temperance replies, "Except for their bones."